When someone Google’s your company name you want to own that first page of results and control the content that shows up. The first and best way to do this is to build the reputation and raking of your social media properties.

This includes your Facebook and Twitter pages, Linkedin profile, Youtube account, Pinterest account, and any other social media/business profile pages that you control. This will increase the SEO strength of these pages and make it more likely that these pages will show up in the #2, #3, #4, #5 spots in the search engine results when someone searches for your name.

This can give your brand name some protection from people who may be writing negative things about you on the internet. When someone searches for your brand name, they will see your main website in the top-ranking spot, followed by all of your social media accounts and profile pages. This is a wonderful result compared to a scenario where someone searches for your brand name, and they see a wide range of people writing negative things about you on sites like Ripoffreport.com, Yelp, Tripadvisor, or perhaps in their own blog articles or news postings.

For some nightmare stories about Negative Yelp Reviews, follow the link to another blog post about this very subject.

You can see this concept at work in the screen shot below. The green arrows represent websites where we are in control of the content. The red arrow is shown next to Yelp – a website where we do not have the ability to control the content. Ideally, you would want Yelp to be completely off of the first page of the results or at least below the fold.

Do you search for something on Google and find it ranked #1 but your friend does the same search and that website is #15? Many people pull their hair out when trying to determine what number a certain keyword ranks. This is due to the personalization features implemented by Google.

Google has gone on record saying that they want all search results to be personalized to some degree. Their tone has been very strongly indicating that the more personalization signals they can find, the more personalized the results you’ll get in your searches.

So how do you get rid of personalized results all together? That is a tricky answer. Luckily there are a few sure fire way, then some others that work for awhile but seem to end up getting turned off again.

One sure fire way to do a search and mask all personalization signals is to use a web browser that does all that for you behind the scenes. The SRWare Iron web browser is the solution. You can search Google for any phrase, any number of times, and you’ll see the true rankings for that keyword.